tim's experiment

So you thought after all this fuss about how the next Chief Executive would be “elected” that the winner would at least be the CE? Think again. The Chinese government will appoint whoever it likes, whether or not he (or she … fat chance) has won the election, or even participated in it.

This was the message buried in the last paragraph of a seriously boring non-story in this morning’s Sunday Post, most of which was devoted to the fact that some academics had suggested postponing the Legco vote on the elections. In a desperate effort to suggest that this was worth telling us about, the reporter said it received a “lukewarm response” from top officials and lawmakers. This seemed a funny way of summing up the responses of Carrie Lam (currently acting CE) and Exco convenor Lam Woon-kwong, who both said it was “not feasible”.

The last paragraph started “Meanwhile…” indicating a polite change of topic. It then introduced Professor Lau Siu-kai, vice chairman of “the semi-official Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies”. Professor Lau is best known as the scholar who capped a career spent telling the world that Hong Kong people were not interested in politics by predicting that the demonstration against national security legislation would attract only a few thousand protestors. I take it that the reason for stressing his current semi-official status rather than his past as a reverse Cassandra (believed …but wrong) is to imply that Prof Lau is privy to official thinking in Beijing.

Just in case this is true, this is what he said (in the Post’s words): “election results obtained under universal suffrage would only provide a ‘reference’ for the central government to decide whether to appoint the elected candidate.” In other words, if our rulers do not like the election result they will over-rule it and appoint someone else. Well this is interesting. After all we have been told time and again that systems of universal suffrage vary, that there are various obstacles to public nomination, Mr Cameron was not elected by the general public, America has an electoral college, and so on. But the one thing which everyone else’s systems for electing a president or prime minister have in common is that the winner does actually get the job. In universal suffrage with Chinese characteristics, on the other hand, we have a distinctive feature. The winner only gets the job if the Communist Party leadership likes the look of him.

Really it makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. We have been told that this is a historic opportunity, that people are in danger of being deprived of the right to vote, that Hong Kong stands on the brink of a new epoch, and such like blather. Actually, all we are being invited to do is to provide a “reference” for the central government. Calm down, everyone. It doesn’t matter what electoral system we use. The winner doesn’t necessarily get the job anyway.

Meanwhile (to coin a phrase) next to Professor Lau’s paragraph we have a picture of Carrie Lam raising two fingers. In some cultures this is polite as long as the fingers face away from you and rude if they face you. In other cultures the reverse is true. Ms Lam is saying f*** you in Greek. Rather similar to what Prof Lau is saying in English.